About the Ensembl Project

The Ensembl project was started in 1999, some years before the draft human genome was completed.
Even at that early stage it was clear that manual annotation of 3 billion base pairs of sequence
would not be able to offer researchers timely access to the latest data. The goal of Ensembl was
therefore to automatically annotate the genome, integrate this annotation with other available
biological data and make all this publicly available via the web. Since the website's launch in
July 2000,
many more genomes have been added to Ensembl and the range of available data has also expanded
to include comparative genomics, variation and regulatory data.

The number of people involved in the project has also steadily increased. Currently, the
Ensembl group consists of between 40 and 50 people, divided in a number of
teams.

The Genebuild team creates the gene sets for the various species. The result of their work is stored in the
core databases, which are taken care of by the Software team. This team also develops and maintains
the BioMart data mining tool.

The Compara, Variation and Regulation teams are responsible
for the comparative, variation and regulatory data, respectively.

The Web team makes sure that all data are presented on the website in a
clear and user-friendly way.

The Production team are responsible for coordinating the regular updates to Ensembl data.

Finally the Outreach
team answers questions from users and gives workshops worldwide about the use of
Ensembl.